Major wireless service providers such as Sprint PCS, Verizon, and many others around the world, have spent tens of billions of dollars over the last several years upgrading their network infrastructure (and licensing spectrum) so that they can offer mobile Web services in addition to mobile voice services.
However, a much discussed problem within the mobile device and wireless service industries is that the “mobile Web” user experience on today's conventional pocketsize mobile devices (e.g. PDAs and smart-phones) is generally much less compelling, useful, and enjoyable than the “real Web” enjoyed regularly by nearly a billion people around the world on personal computers.
The mobile phone industry learned long ago that devices must be pocketsize and relatively affordable to become widely adopted by mobile service subscribers. However, because of display and man-machine-interface limitations of today's conventional pocketsize devices, most people consider the mobile Web experience on today's conventional pocketsize devices to be clunky, constrained, tedious, and scraped-down compared to the real Web experienced on desktop and notebook computers.
This problem is contributing to much slower adoption of mobile Web services than has occurred with mobile voice services over the last several years. (Some alternative mobile data services, such as “text-messaging”, have become popular, because those simple applications are not significantly constrained by the display and man-machine-interface limitations of today's pocketsize mobile devices. Web access is a more demanding application.)
A typical wireless mobile device contains a radio, which allows Internet data to be transmitted to the device, and a display that can present content on an active surface of the display. The displays are controlled by a display controller unit that may be implemented by readily available general or special purpose computers, whereby the implementation details are well known to those skilled in the art. Most Web pages are designed to be about 800 pixels wide. And on desktop computer monitors and laptop displays, users typically open their Web browsers to be around 800 pixels wide or wider and around 600 pixels tall. (Herein, a display, image or window that is 800 pixels wide by 600 pixels tall shall be referred to as 800×600 pixel.) But to keep mobile devices “pocket-size”, most of today's mobile devices (such as data-enabled mobile phones and PDAs) use displays that are 320×480 pixel or smaller, which is too small to display more than about ⅓ of the 800×600 pixel area that people are used to seeing on desktop computers. That leads to an unsatisfying Web browsing experience, because users have to constantly scroll to get to the information they want. The low pixel count makes it hard for users to orient themselves and figure out where the information they want is hiding on a Web page since they can only look at the page “through a straw” (i.e. through a tiny window). This is why, in a review of a popular brand of hand-held computer with a 240×320 pixel display, in the Jul. 7, 2003, edition of eWeek, the reviewer noted that the device “still suffers (along with the rest of the hand-held browser world) from the fact that Web pages are not designed for low-resolution displays.”
In a few cases, mobile device makers have tried to address this problem, while still keeping the device pocket-size, by using displays with very high pixel densities (i.e. very small pixels)—pixel densities over 175 pixels-per-inch (which is refered to by the nomenclature of 175 pixels-per-inch, 175 ppi, 175 dots-per-inch, or 175 dpi). But displays with pixel densities that high tend to make it very hard to read Web page content (particularly text) when the content is simply squeezed onto those displays because some text can become too tiny to read comfortably, if at all.
Some device makers use larger displays that have readable pixel densities (well under 175 ppi) and plenty of pixels (sometimes 800×600 pixel or more), but their devices (which typically include buttons and controls on the frames surrounding the displays) are too big to be considered “pocket size”—well over 6 inches in width or height or both.
Table 1 lists some examples of known hand-held devices, their display pixel counts, approximate pixel densities, and approximate display sizes (measured diagonally in inches). This list includes the approximate size and pixel density of each device's display only, not the full size of the complete device. The full size of each device is generally considerably larger than the display size, since the devices generally include frames with buttons, controls and other components embedded. For example, the Casio MPC-501 Mini-Tablet's display is 6.7″ diagonal, and its frame includes many buttons to the right of the display, so the full device is 8.2 inches wide by 5.2 inches tall—much too big to be considered “pocket-size,” by many users.
TABLE 1Some examples of known hand-held devices and theirrespective display configurations.display sizepixel(diagonalDevice:pixel countdensityinches)IPM Myfriend eBook640 × 960150 ppi 7.7″Millitech Saturn PDA640 × 480200 ppi 4.0″Pogo nVoy Communicator320 × 240114 ppi 3.5″Cyberbank PC-e Phone640 × 480200 ppi 4.0″Fujitsu LOOX T5/53W1280 × 600 141 ppi10.0″e-Lab p40 IA Pad1024 × 768 202 ppi 6.4″Sony Clie PEG-NX80V320 × 480152 ppi 3.8″Samsung iTodo Mega-PDA800 × 480187 ppi  5″Aqcess Tablet PC 768 × 1024123 ppi10.4″Casio MPC-501 Mini-Tablet800 × 600149 ppi 6.7″Palm Tungsten C320 × 320150 ppi  3″HP iPaq H5550240 × 320105 ppi 3.8″Nokia 7650 data-enabled phone176 × 208128 ppi 2.1″T-Mobile Sidekick(by Danger Inc.)240 × 160115 ppi 2.5″Nokia Communicator 9110640 × 200150 ppi 4.4″DataWind Web access device640 × 240128 ppi5.34″
Each of the mobile devices above and all known conventional hand-held mobile devices today have some attribute that makes Web access on that device uncomfortable for most people or that makes the device too big to fit comfortably in most people's pockets. For example, the devices with displays whose pixel counts are 320×480 pixel or smaller simply cannot display enough of a Web page: User's have to scroll too much, and they suffer from the disorienting “looking through a straw” phenomenon. On the devices with pixel densities over 175 pixels-per-inch (175 ppi), Web pages are rendered to small for most people to comfortably read smaller text on most pages (if they can read the text at all). The devices that are over 6 inches (in width or height) are too big to fit comfortably in most people's pockets. Known devices using conventional displays are often larger in width or height than the diagonal length of the displays, since the frames around the devices often are made large enough to hold buttons and controls. The “Pogo” device's frame does not include buttons or controls, but the Pogo device's display is only 320×240 pixel.)
Most of today's mobile devices also have displays that are taller than they are wide (sometimes referred to as “portrait” orientation rather than “landscape” orientation). So, for example, the Sony CLIE device mentioned above is only 320 pixels wide, which means less than 40% of a typical Web page's width is visible at any give time. As noted above, the resulting experience with these devices is that the user feels like they are looking at Web pages “through a straw”, seeing just a small portion at a time, with extensive scrolling required to browse the full page. This effect may be simulated by opening a Web page on a desktop computer monitor and shrinking the Web browser window so that only a small portion is visible.
Even if the Sony CLIE with its 320×480 pixel display were changed to display Web pages in landscape orientation—480 pixels wide by 320 pixels tall—the portion of a Web page visible at any given time is still too small to result in satisfying general purpose Web browsing, in our experience. Such a device could only display ⅓ the number of pixels that a user typically views on a desktop computer (e.g. ⅓ of 800×600 pixel). More importantly, such a device is only 60% the width of a typical 800 pixel wide Web page. That would certainly be better than trying to browse a Web page on a device with a 160×160 pixel or 240×320 pixel display, but our experiments (using Web browser windows shrunk to various pixel dimensions) indicate that browsing with a 480×320 pixel wide display (let alone all the current devices that have even smaller pixel counts) is too limiting to allow for satisfying general Web access over extended periods of use. It still requires too much scrolling and it still feels like “looking through a straw” at the Web pages.
There exist unresolved needs of many companies in the wireless service and mobile device industries. Among these needs is the need to significantly improve the mobile Web user experience on pocketsize devices, in order to attract more subscribers to emerging mobile Web services. Several early mobile Web services failed in large part because potential subscribers did not find the service compelling enough given the limitation of conventional pocketsize devices, and they did not want to carry around non-pocketsize devices. (Examples of these unsuccessful early mobile Web services include Monet Mobile, Omnisky, GoAmerica, and Metricom's Ricochet service.)
Some companies (such as Danger Inc.) offer services that attempt to shrink Web content into a format more suitable for low-resolution displays (such as the 240×160 pixel displays in devices designed by Danger Inc. for T-Mobile and other wireless operators). However, most Web content is designed for much larger displays, and accessing shrunk or transformed versions of most pages leads to display or interaction problems (ranging from ugly formatting to broken interaction features) and results in a Web access experience that most people find far less satisfying than accessing the Web on a desktop or notebook computer. This, along with the “looking through a straw” phenomenon discussed above, are among the reasons that very few people use today's hand-held devices to access the Web, even though wireless Internet networks are now widely available (for example, from service providers such as Sprint PCS, Verizon, T-Mobile, and AT&T Wireless in the U.S., as well as most wireless operators in Europe and Asia). Today's “wireless Web”, accessed through today's hand-held devices, is simply nothing like the real Web that hundreds of millions of people enjoy accessing on their desktop and notebook computers.
One device that takes a different approach than most others is the PC-EPhone by a company named Cyberbank. The PC-Ephone uses a 4″ diagonal display that is 640×480 pixels. That is enough pixels to display most of the width of a typical Web page, which is a step in the right direction. However, to keep the device small, Cyberbank's device squeezes all of those pixels onto a display that is only about 4″ diagonal, making the display's pixel density about 200 dots per inch (ppi). That means that about 80% of a typical web page's width (i.e. 640 pixels of a typical Web page's 800 pixel width) is displayed on a display that is less than 3.5 inches across. That makes the Web pages uncomfortably small for most people, particularly when trying to read the text on most Web pages: Print on typical web pages appears exceedingly tiny on the PC-EPhone device. Furthermore, even though Cyberbank used a display with very high pixel density (i.e. very small pixels), their device is fairly tall (127 mm tall) because it includes various buttons and controls on the face of the device below the display.
Device makers typically use traditional electrical-mechanical controls (referred to herein as “mechanical” controls), such as buttons, rollers, jog-dials, toggle switches, joy sticks, and so on, as a means for allowing users to control functions on a device. And many device makers have incorporated rollers or jog-dials to allow scrolling in at least one dimension (usually just vertically). When a device only allows vertical scrolling, then content that is wider than the display width (such as many Web pages) must be reformatted by the device or by a remote server to fit horizontally onto the device's display, and such reformatting always changes the look of the page and often changes the behavior of Web page elements. A company named DataWind (www.datawind.com) recently developed a Web browsing device with two roller controls for scrolling—one roller on the right side of the top edge of the device (for horizontal scrolling) and another roller on the right side of the device (for vertical scrolling)—and with a 640×240 pixel display. Having separate horizontal and vertical scroll controllers is an improvement compared to only having a vertical scroll controller. However, the DataWind's placement of the horizontal scroll controller along the top edge of the device (rather than the bottom edge) is inconvenient and unnatural to many users because, when holding a device that is wider than it is tall, such as the DataWind device, the user's thumbs tend to rest along the bottom of the device, not along the top of the device.
In view of the foregoing, there is a need for improved techniques for displaying and interacting with multimedia information on hand-held electronic devices.
Unless otherwise indicated illustrations in the figures are not necessarily drawn to scale.